The Finnish company Cupori Group Oy, which in the spring took over the copper business of Outokumpu Copper Tube, now supplies a copper tube with a particularly clean surface. At the Intersolar 2008 in Munich in June the company presented its new “Tub-e” copper tubes, although still under the old name. They are claimed to have a particularly clean surface thanks to a thermal cleaning process. According to Cupori, welding times during absorber manufacture are shorter with the new tubes.

At the beginning of August the Swiss company Clariant brought a new heat transfer medium for solar thermal systems out onto the market under the name Antifrogen Sol HT. The antifreeze has been designed to survive stagnation temperatures of over 270 °C unscathed.